


A Wonder

by foolhearty



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Crushes, F/M, Fluff, Jester is a Confusing Woman, Kissing, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Realizations of Love, Referenced Past!Astrid/Caleb, friendly teasing, mild argument, mild miscommunication
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-14
Updated: 2018-07-14
Packaged: 2019-06-10 13:24:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15292458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foolhearty/pseuds/foolhearty
Summary: ...But now he wonders at Jester, turning to face her. He wonders at her seemingly innate selfishness that breaks under her worry for her friends when they are in most dire need of her aid. He wonders at her growth, too, and takes a certain pride in seeing her become slowly more responsible as a woman and a person. He lets a silence hang after her words for a time before suddenly, in a muffled voice due to his posture and the scarf half-strangling around his throat, asks:“Are you wearing your makeup in a different fashion today, Jester?”





	A Wonder

**Author's Note:**

> So, I'm not 100% caught up on CR but I know some things have happened in the last couple weeks. Lets just happily consider this as a quasi-fixit oneshot that takes place after all the Bad Things and now the party is all together again and At Peace For The Time Being. 
> 
> This is unbeta'd, so expect some tense shifts and spelling errors but honestly??? I just wanted some jestergast Content so I had to write this fast once the mood struck me.

Watching her from across the table, he finds himself as interested in the lines of freckles across her cheeks as he is in the lines of information written across the page of the book he’s been attempting to read for the last thirty minutes. She’s jovial, stretching out across the table when addressing those she speaks to, and her attitude is infectious. Even Caleb, known for his subdued moments of calm, finds himself cracking a smile each time he spots her tail twisting wildly in the air behind her. Like it has a mind of it’s own, each time she snorts a laugh her tail straightens out perfectly only to curl in on itself rapidly only a moment later. 

She’s expressive and open: both things Caleb has come to enjoy about her and the rest of their companions, but also both things Caleb very much isn’t himself. Hunching slightly and lifting his book to make up the difference, he hides behind the pages for a moment to get a temporary moment of alone time whilst at their crowded table. He evens his breathing and forces the smile off his face, dreading to be so easily read.

“Caleb,” a high and rattly voice addresses him: it’s Nott, resting one of her tiny hands on his knee. “Are you feeling bad?” She’s speaking in a hushed tone, as if they could possibly have a private conversation with the prying ears of their companions only a handful of feet away from them around a table. It’s a comforting gesture, if futile; again, Caleb smiles. 

“No,” Caleb assures, lowering his book but remianing hunched. He lowers his head to the table entirely, looking in Nott’s eyes. He notices the conversation at the table dwindling as he does so, but has resigned himself to lacking the privacy. “No, Nott. I feel fine.”

She looks unconvinced, but Caleb knows his goblin friend well enough to know that she won’t push it until they’ve retired to their room for the evening - if they share a room for the evening. It is a heartwarming thing, watching Nott grow in her own ways; she’s befriending the rest of their companions in earnest now, spending as many nights bunking with the girls as she does with Caleb himself. There are pinpricks of jealousy, an old, sick flame of emotion from his childhood that he’s endeavored to stifle under his boot-heel; Nott is his closest friend in the world, now, and it is at times difficult to share her trust and confidence with others. 

But it is a good thing, he knows, that she is learning to trust others. It is good that he is learning to trust others, as well. Again, his attention drifts across their group and lands on Jester. She’s all but crawled atop their table and has placed her face within inches of Caleb’s own; she fixes him with one of those discerning glances that reminds him that as silly as she behaves on the whole, she is at heart at heart a girl with her own sort of wisdom. 

“Caleb,” she extends the a’s and e’s in his name comically, but her voice is low and serious. “You are not lying to us, are you? I have an eye for these things. If you have a tummy ache and have to go poopy real bad, I’ll never forgive you. I know ways to get rid of that you know! You have to tell us when you feel poopy and bad!”

Her crass language is so different from where how individuals speak where he comes from. In his home town, not many were learned but all were polite nonetheless; in Rexxentrum, gods above, everyone Caleb met and studied with and admitted was learned and spoke in measured tones that spoke to their years of mastering their emotions. It had been a wonder, then, spending time trying to emulate them alongside Astrid and Eodwulf before entering Trent’s  _ care _ . It had been a wonder of a year.

But now he wonders at Jester, turning to face her. He wonders at her seemingly innate selfishness that breaks under her worry for her friends when they are in most dire need of her aid. He wonders at her growth, too, and takes a certain pride in seeing her become slowly more responsible as a woman and a person. He lets a silence hang after her words for a time before suddenly, in a muffled voice due to his posture and the scarf half-strangling around his throat, asks:

“Are you wearing your makeup in a different fashion today, Jester?”

All at once, conversation around their table ceases; where before it had simply quieted and continued, it is now gone. Each face within their Nein turns to look at him with varying levels of confusion and curiosity. From the corner of his eye, Caleb can see that Mollymauk and Yasha look ripe to burst and ready to watch where this sudden line of questioning goes. 

With all the attention on him, Caleb feels heat rise to his neck and cheeks. He clears his throat before Jester can respond and straightens in his chair. 

“What I mean to say, Jester, is that I feel fine. I assure you. I am simply finding it difficult to concentrate on my book this afternoon.”

“Because you’ve apparently been ogling our cleric,” Mollymauk amends, raising an eyebrow and smirking. “How unlike you, Caleb! It was my understanding that you could read a book just about anywhere.”

Caleb laments his pale complextion, momentarily longing for the presentation he had in his youth when he was still active and confident and looked healthy. It is not often he wishes for such things, but under Jester’s watchful gaze it would be...  _ comforting _ , to be a bit less gangly and sickly in appearance. 

“That is my leave to make for my room, then,” he says suddenly, rising to his feet. “I will see you all in a few hours, once our evening plans have been decided.”

“Caleb, don’t leave,” Beau huffs, “We’re just fucking with you, you prickly asshole.”

“I am aware, Beauregard. I take no offense.” He continues walking as he speaks. “I simply need to finish reading this book and will not be the stick in the mud for yet another afternoon.” For the sake of not seeming too sour, he adds a joking lilt to his tone as he says his final piece: “I will allow you all an afternoon free of my boringness. Someone come and fetch me if plans are made to leave for the night.”

  
  
  
  


He ascends the stairs to the top floor of the inn and retires into his and Nott’s room, shutting the door behind him. All at once, the easy exterior he’d put on for the sake of the group falls away and he feels small and his chest feels tight and all over, he’s warm. 

It has been a very, very long time since he has felt this particular strain of embarrassment course through his veins. He cannot say he’s excited to feel it once again. He trips onto the bed face first and forces slow breathes through his pillow. He is no fool; despite his over a decade of being sequestered away in an asylum with only fellow patients and uncaring staff for company, Caleb is aware of the feelings bubbling within him. 

All at once, he’s seventeen again and awestruck by a woman with a strong personality and personal drive. His traitor heart has beat against all his built-up walls just enough that there are cracks now, and he feels a painful mix of emotions each time Jester does something that impresses him. He feels light, as is perhaps her intended effect: she does try so earnestly to keep their little troup in good spirits, after all. But he also feels a hollow ache, the loneliness of looking to his past and seeing the beautiful face of a brown haired, hazel eyed girl practicing magic at his side. 

He had been so sure, back then, with Astrid and Eodwulf at his side, and despite the pain the three of them had been forced to go through for years under Trent’s supervision, he had been happy. He had been in love.

He no longer feels he deserves that sort of happiness.

In the background, he hears the quiet sound of the door to the room opening and shutting with a soft click. He remains still in place, face down on the bed. Nott has found him this way before, has sat beside him and rubbed his back until his stress and fears have subsided. There is less shame in allowing Nott to see him this way than there would be were it anyone else.

A weight shifts his balance on the bed suddenly, and Caleb’s heart nearly stops. A distinct weight joins him on the bed, more weight than Nott could possibly be soaking wet, and Caleb shoots from his place and too his feet in one fast, panicked motion, hand ready to dig through his pockets and grab either his diamond or his cat’s paw - whichever he finds first. 

“Caleb!” Jester half-shouts, stretching an arm out in front of herself protectively. “It’s only me!”

There’s a stretch of second where Caleb’s fingertips sit frozen along the hard edges of his diamond, broken only by Caleb grumbling a halfhearted  _ “I could have burned you alive!” _ as he falls backwards onto the other bed.

“You wouldn’t have,” she says cheerily, confidently, as she hops up and joins him once again on the other bed as well. “You wouldn’t hurt any of us Caleb. We all trust you, you know.”

There’s a biting urge to hiss  _ “you shouldn’t” _ in her face, but he resists. The look she wears is something determined and for once in his life, he doesn’t have it in him to try and prove her wrong, to try and prove to her just how unworthy he is of that trust.

When he says nothing, she takes it as invitation to do so herself in the only was she knows how: by transitioning from one topic into another with absolutely zero segue to make the transition seem casual.

“If you were ogling me I wouldn’t be mad at you, Caleb, you know? Because I know I can be very pretty and that you haven’t been around a lot of people for a long time until you met all of us, and we all know Beau and Yasha aren’t interested in your sort of person. If you were looking at me today, I wouldn’t be mad. You are just awkward and I know that.”

How she’s able to say so much in so few breaths is beyond Caleb’s comprehension, but he’s dumbstruck as she keeps at it. 

“I mean a lot of people look at me you know but usually it’s because they aren’t used to seeing people that are bluuue or people that have hooorns or people that talk to their god in public like a playmate from childhood or-”

“That is going to put you in danger someday, Jester.” He breaks whatever tangent she’s put herself on with a sudden seriousness. “Talking to your god in public is going to get you hurt someday.” 

“Caleb?”

He knows he must look frightening and harsh. It is unfair, to try and restrict her nature. It’s very unfair of him to act this way, but he keeps saying words despite knowing he will hurt her with them. “I do not know your Traveler but I know he is not allowed in the Empire. Talking to him will get you killed if you keep insisting on public displays of worship. It might get you killed if you insist on private ones.”

He remembers, long ago, dozens of faces of terrified civilians brought into the confines of Trent’s summer cottage. Caleb remembers torturing them personally, remembers killing them in front of one another, for the simple act of putting their faith in a god of their choosing

He feels sick. 

“Jester, I do not wish to see you come to harm.”

“I won’t. He protects me when it matters most. And you all do too.” She says it like it’s simple, like it’s obvious. “You keep to yourself in battle Caleb, but you keep us safe too. I’ve noticed how you fight, you know? It’s nice. You have strong spells that can hurt a lot of people, but you also have spells that help us do more damage too. You put things to sleep for us so we can regroup, you keep things still so they can’t dodge us... We keep each other safe. I’m not scared.”

Simple and obvious. 

She makes it so difficult to argue, when she explains how she thinks. Caleb gawks at her for a while, processing her argument and comparing it against his own and he’s still terrified on her behalf (terrified in the same was he is for Mollymauk and his Moonweaver and all the rest of them really; they are a group of heretics, believing in gods banned by the land they reside in), he can’t bring himself to keep fighting her.

So he does something far stupider. 

“I was not ogling you out there, Jester, but I may have... I may have been staring, just a bit. I may have been staring. I apologize.”

She looks far less taken aback than he anticipated. He can never quite get a perfect read on her. It drives him mad and it is one of the few things he absolutely adores about being in her presence day in and day out. Caleb is many things: a self-hating man and a cruel one among those things, but he is also very clever and very good at reading a scene, and reading her is difficult. It’s stimulating mentally and emotionally in a way he hasn’t been stimulated in years.

“I told you I wasn’t mad.” She sounds lax, then suddenly far too excited for her own good. “Caleb! Does this mean you think I’m pretty?”

“I-”

“Oh, Caleb, am I your TYPE? Do you want to  _ do things _ with me? Do you think I’m PRETTY?” She sounds delighted, in her own way, but he’s wary of that excitement. She is hard to read. He has seen her use that excitement to cover her own traumas, in the past.

“Jester, Jester... Stop, please. You are- you are making this more embarrassing for me than... than I think I can rightly handle at this moment. It- It is nothing so overtly... physically charged.” He winces, truly hoping she didn’t think he was only interested in matters of the flesh. He hangs his head, cards his hands through his hair, and decides to try and get through this with as little emotional scarring as possible. “You are... You are something. You are bright, you know? You are very bright and very kind, and I think you are vital to... to the happiness of our group, to the comfort of our group. You are... truly someone important. We all treasure you, even- even when we seem exasperated by your antics.”

“Caleb... You are the only one who ever seems exasperated by my antics.”

“Ah. Yes. This is.. True.”

“And you treasure me? _Treasure_ me?”

“Yeah. Yes.”

He feels beaten down, in a strange way; his throat is tight and he wonders at what point she will choose to blackmail him with this or slap him or simply leave him alone in the room to suffer his idiocy for the remainder of the night. Instead, she squeaks and catches him by surprise when she falls into a tiny fit of laughter. 

“You are a stinky man,” she giggles, moving from her cross-legged position on the bed to sit on her knees instead. “You are stinky and you like hiding in your own head. But you’re pretty cute when you’re honest.” 

Again, he’s dumbstruck. She is getting good at this, dangerously so. He realizes idly that by admitting these things to her, he has given her ammunition to use against him when she wants something. He finds it hard to care about what that something could potentially entail. 

“Caleb. I want another dance with you.” She sounds like she’s already decided it’s going to happen, and he nods dumbly as she takes his face in her hands and makes him look her in the eyes. “And no drinking next time, okay? We have to practice so that someday when we visit my mother in Nicodranas, we can dance and show her I’ve gotten better at it since I left home.”

“What?”

“And I don’t want her to think I’m dancing with any old stinky drunk that wants to ogle me, you know? So when we dance you aren’t allowed to drink too much. It will be okay,” she sounds confident, “because we will have more fun when we dance together well. So you won’t need to be drunk to have fun. It will be nice.” She nods furiously. “We will have fun together now.”

Again, he asks “what?” and is met with no further explanation - only the feeling of a myriad of sloppy, excitable kisses across his cheeks and nose.

“Come back downstairs when you’re ready, Caleb. Everyone thinks you came up here to go poopy and I don’t want them to think I would kiss someone while they were going poopy okay? So come back down when you’re ready, but be quick, okay? Bye Caleb!”

Before he can squawk another “what?!” at her face, she’s darted to her feet and out of the room, leaving him lost at the whirlwind of things that had just happened to him. She wanted to impress her mother with him? She had- She had... given him his first kisses since his young adulthood. There’s a lump in his throat and all over again, he’s flushed and embarrassed. 

But he climbs to his feet anyway, and adjusts his scarf, and - against every alarm ringing in his head - marches dutifully downstairs to reconvene with his companions after Jester.


End file.
